Alden Stradling's dashboard

Allow the ssh connection to automatically wake a remote machine, with the appropriate parameters, to establish a connection to the disks.

When the "Wake on ethernet network administrator access" option in the system prefs is selected, a remote Mac can be awakened by a specially formed "magic packet". This packet can be generated (for example) by the following script:

#! /usr/bin/env python
# Copyright (C) 2002 by Micro Systems Marc Balmer
# Written by Marc Balmer, marc@msys.ch, http://www.msys.ch/
# This code is free software under the GPL

import time, struct, socket, commands

def WakeOnLan(ethernet_address, hostname):
ipaddr=commands.getoutput('host %s' % hostname).split()[-1]
print ipaddr
# Construct a six-byte hardware address

addr_byte = ethernet_address.split(':')
hw_addr = struct.pack('BBBBBB', int(addr_byte[0], 16),
int(addr_byte[1], 16),
int(addr_byte[2], 16),
int(addr_byte[3], 16),
int(addr_byte[4], 16),
int(addr_byte[5], 16))

# Build the Wake-On-LAN "Magic Packet"...

msg = '\xff' * 6 + hw_addr * 16

# ...and send it to the broadcast address using UDP

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
s.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_BROADCAST, 1)
s.sendto(msg, (ipaddr, 9))
s.close()

# Example use
#time.sleep(60)
WakeOnLan('FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF','me.site.org')

The user would have to supply the MAC address of the machine to be able to do this trick. The IP address should be determined via DNS lookup.

An Eject All button in the menu bar might be nice for those of use who have 5-10 drives open at any given time.